porcini butter recipe – use real butter (2024)

Recipe: porcini butter

Today (Wednesday) was my last day of my 6-week skate ski program. While I will miss meeting up with this fine group of women and my awesome instructor, I have to say I’m happy to get my Wednesdays back. That, and I look forward to not being completely wiped out at the end of a long day of skate skiing and drills. I signed up for this program to jump start my introduction to skate skiing. On the registration form, I was asked to mark my ability level, so I checked off “Green: Beginner”, because that’s what I was. Little did I expect to be grouped into the intermediate class. I came into this program with the willingness to work hard, but this level of instruction required even more than I had anticipated.

So I worked. Hard. It wasn’t enough to just show up to class once a week, I needed to practice several times between classes so I could improve and take full advantage of the instruction I received. In the beginning it was crazy frustrating trying to piece together all of the elements of the technique while being completely exhausted from the hills. But I stuck with it as punishing as it felt, and within a couple of weeks I noticed some improvement. I am by no means what I consider a proficient skate skier, but I feel like I can practice and skate toward that goal equipped with the knowledge and understanding that our instructor shared over the last month and a half.

After a day of skating up and down the hills at Eldora, it’s necessary to come home to an easy menu. I’ll tell you what, though – I think easy menus are perfect just about any time. We gave up going out to dinner on Valentine’s Day over two decades ago, opting for a delicious home-cooked meal in the privacy of our own home. This spared us the headache of having to jostle among crowds of couples with unreasonably high expectations for the evening. When I tried this recipe, my intention was to shoot for “easy”. Only after sitting down to eat our dinner, did I realized how a simple porcini butter could transform a meal into a swoon-worthy experience.

The name, porcini butter, is practically the recipe itself. It requires dried porcini mushrooms and butter – a match made in heaven. If you are using unsalted butter, you can opt to add salt. I personally hold off on adding salt because I like to add it separately. Unlike fresh porcini, dried porcini are mush easier to find in grocery stores if you don’t have your own. They are usually packed in 1 oz. bags or containers. The butter should be at room temperature so you can cream it easily with a fork. Use a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle to turn the porcini into a fine powder. Everything will start to smell of porcini at this point.

An ounce of dried porcini is roughly equivalent to a cup of dried porcini. When ground, it yields about a third of a cup of powder. Mix a tablespoon and a half of the powder into a stick (4 ounces) of butter until it looks like creamy peanut butter. If using salt, this is a good time to add it. Leftover porcini powder is not a bad thing. You can save it for other uses or mix it with sea salt (2:1 salt to porcini powder ratio). Once the butter is blended, roll it up in wax paper to make a log or pipe it onto wax paper for fancier presentation. Refrigerate the butter to firm it up.

We grilled steaks and decided to slap a pat of porcini butter on top. Decadent, I know. Originally, I had planned on filet mignon which benefits from the added fat since the cut is so lean. But after talking with the butcher, he and I both agreed that there is nothing wrong with serving a potent compound butter on a juicy, marbled rib-eye. Sprinkle some flake sea salt on top and what a heady combination! Porcini butter isn’t limited to steaks – try it with eggs, potatoes, pasta, fish, roasted chicken (rub it under the skin), bread, roasted vegetables, anything you can think of. Simply delightful.

Porcini Butter
[print recipe]

1/4 cup dried porcini (or 1 1/2 tbsps of porcini powder)
4 oz. butter, room temperature
salt to taste (optional)

Place the dried porcini in a spice grinder (or use a mortar and pestle) and grind it into a fine powder. Cream the butter in a small bowl with a fork until smooth. Stir the porcini powder into the butter until uniform in color. Stir in the salt, if using. Place the butter on wax paper and form into a log with a 1 1/4 inch diameter. Wrap the log and refrigerate for an hour. Slice the log with a dry, warm knife. Or pipe the soft butter with a large piping tip onto wax paper and refrigerate until hard (about 30 minutes depending on size). Makes 8 tablespoons of porcini butter.

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italian-style beef and porcini stew

February 11th, 2015: 11:49 pm
filed under condiments, dairy, entertaining, gluten-free, recipes, savory, vegetables